What do daydreams, lectures, and helices have to do with each other? Quite a bit.

One of my favorite parts of Dante’s Purgatorio is at the end of Canto XVIII, when Dante starts dozing off. Here is Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of those lines:

aaaThen, when those shades were so far off from us
that seeing them became impossible,
a new thought rose inside of me and, fromaaathat thought, still others–many and diverse–
were born: I was so drawn from random thought
to thought, that, wandering in mind, I shutaaamy eyes, transforming thought on thought to dream.

I read this as a tribute to daydreaming (though Dante is on the verge of sleep and a nightmare). To be “so drawn from random thought / to thought” (in the original: “e tanto d’uno in altro vaneggiai”) is to have an expanse and few restrictions; I love this kind of expanse, though of course I can’t have it all the time.

As I have said elsewhere, that is one thing I enjoy about lectures: they not only take my mind to unexpected places, but they send it wandering off to the side and back, or backwards and forwards. While listening to a lecture, I may do with my mind what I please; if the lecture is good, then my mind dances with it, sometimes spinning away, sometimes drawing close. If the lecture is bad (or dreadfully dull, as lectures sometimes can be), then my mind can go off on its own. This, too, has its benefits.

Lecture or no lecture, I need time to let my mind go where it wishes. A few days ago I took out a textbook of three-dimensional calculus and started reading the chapter on vectors. The vector equation for a helix immediately made sense:

r(t) = cos t i + sin tj + tk

where i = , j = , and k = . (These are unit vectors along the x-, y-, and z-axes, respectively.)

If you omit the z-axis, you can see that you have the vector equation for circular counterclockwise motion:

r(t) = cos t i + sin tj

Adding the component t k turns the circle into an upward spiral.

I toyed with this in my mind for a while. The next day, I encountered a helix again, when reading Taking the Back off the Watch: A Personal Memoir by the astrophysicist Thomas Gold (1920–2004). Before the helix passage, there was a wonderful comment on the possibilities for thought during a dull lecture:

A dull lecture is like an experiment in sensory deprivation. You are sitting in your seat, you can’t leave the room because that would be too rude, you are carefully shutting out the incoming information because you have decided you don’t want to hear it, and your mind is now completely free from external disturbances. It was during this lecture that I suddenly saw how all the facts of the case would fall together.

Yes, during this dull lecture he figured out why a sound entering the cochlea produces a “microphonic potential”–an electric potential that both amplifies the sound and mimics its waveform. He took his theory to Richard Pumphrey, with whom he had been investigating this matter; they published their papers in 1948. But that’s an aside here (though interesting in itself). I bring this up because his words about the lecture rang true, so to speak, in my mind. Then, a few pages later, I came upon his description of an experiment with a helix and an eel.

The eel can move forward along a sinusoidal curve, both horizontally and vertically. Thomas Gold and the zoologist Sir James Gray found that it could move swiftly and easily through a sinusoidal tube. Sir James Gray posited that the eel could therefore move through a helical tube; a helix, after all, is the addition of the vertical sinusoid to the horizontal sinusoid in three-dimensional space. Thomas Gold disagreed; he was convinced that the eel could not move through the helical tube. He was right.

Very well. But I was momentarily intrigued with the problem that would be elementary to mathematicians: is the vector equation

r(t) = cos t i + sin tj + tk

equivalent to the addition of two traveling sinusoidal waves, one horizontal, one vertical, in three-dimensional space? I grasped that it was but spent a little time explaining it to myself. Yes, and the two sinusoids must be a quarter-cycle out of phase with each other.

The first traveling sinusoidal wave has the equation r(t) = cos t i + t/2k.

As of November 2017, she teaches English, American civilization, and British civilization at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok, Hungary. From 2011 to 2016, she helped shape and teach the philosophy program at Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science & Engineering in New York City. In 2014, her students released the inaugural issue of their philosophy journal, CONTRARIWISE, which has international participation and readership.